Malaysia - Case Study

NEXEDGE is now available across Malaysia

Since 1999, Mal-Tel Communication Sdn Bhd (Mal-Tel) has been providing radio communication services to the public and private sectors in Malaysia. It added an analogue LTR trunking system in 2001, but is now turning to digital solutions – the wave of the future. And KENWOOD’s NEXEDGE represents the most advanced professional digital trunked radio service (DTRS) ever offered by Mal-Tel to network operators and end-users. The main advantage for public and private network users is the ability to migrate from the current analogue system to the wider, clearer NXDN service, which meets today's and tomorrow's spectrum requirements.

Planning a digital future

To ensure that Malaysia’s future radio communications requirements are met, and the government is lending momentum to the industry’s shift from analogue to digital technologies. On July 14, 2010, an official announcement was made by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), the country’s regulator for spectrum management, stating that the public trunking network will switch from 800MHz to the UHF 410-430MHz band (or other identified bands) by December 2015. One objective is to solve the problem of congestion in the 800MHz band, which from 2015 will be assigned to LTE (3GPP Long Term Evolution), an emerging standard that enables mobile phones to benefit from high-speed wireless data communications.

Finding the optimum solution

Since almost 80% of the analogue trunked radio service providers in Malaysia are currently operating in the 800MHz spectrum, traffic congestion is inevitable. Common problems faced by users are missed calls, garbled messages and degraded voice quality. Looking to provide its customers with a better service, free from these problems, Mal-Tel examined the latest digital technologies. And their conclusion was that KENWOOD’s NEXEDGE system is the optimum solution.

Meeting key criteria

What then were the most important reasons for Mal-Tel’s choice? First, it was crucial that this digital radio technology could operate on 12.5kHz and 6.25kHz narrowband frequencies, making it 2 to 4 times more spectrum efficient than the current 25kHz analogue network. Another priority was sound quality, and thanks to state-of-the-art AMBE+2™ vocoder voice compression technology, NEXEDGE offers superior clarity at varying signal strengths, even in fringe areas.

There were, of course, other contenders, but for example, TETRA would require many more repeaters base stations to ensure the same coverage as NXDN, and the P25 system is considered too expensive to offer a practical trunk radio solution for the general market in Malaysia.

Offering nationwide coverage

In June 2011 Mal-Tel started building its own digital trunked radio service – the NX-Digital™ Service – powered by KENWOOD’s NEXEDGE technology. As part of the company’s nationwide roll-out plan, Mal-Tel’s specialised sales teams are marketing subscription-based services and radio hardware in 13 zones spread across 6 main regions in Malaysia. For comprehensive service coverage, each of the 13 zones will have more than 30 sites, and each site will have 5 to 20 NXR-800 repeaters. As of Feb 2012, 8 sites have been set up, with another 5 sites to be developed by June. Already, there are almost 1,000 subscribers, but that is just the beginning. “We hope to have 50,000 subscriber units before the total shutdown of analogue trunked radio in Malaysia in December 2015”, explained Simon Yew, CEO of Mal-Tel.